Archive for WordPress

Blogsy App for iPad makes mobile blogging easy

By Dennis Guten on January 8, 2012 No Comments

The Blogsy iPad AppDo you have an iPad and are you frustrated with the stock WordPress app for your blogging needs? I just purchased a new (new for me anyway) app called Blogsy that takes blogging on the iPad a notch up from that underwhelming experience. It works for WordPress.com, self hosted WordPress sites, Blogger and Posterious blogs. I’m creating this post in the app and it’s pretty easy. Some of the improvements from the regular iPad WordPress app:  
 

  • Rich text formatting – alignment, bold, italic, underline, quotes, colors, background color of text, font sizes, font family, lists
  • True HTML editing
  • Images – add from iPad, Flickr account, Picassa account, Google images
  • Videos – add from your YouTube account
  • Safari – add images and links by drag and drop

The Blogsy website has a number of how to videos that walk you through all the features and help files. The app was only $4.99 and so far has been well worth it. I’ll talk about it more after I have some more experience with it, but I think I have found my answer to blogging on the iPad. If anyone has had any longer term experience with Blogsy I’d love to hear from you on your experiences or any tips you might have.Check out Blogsy on their website.  

Categories : iPad, Software, WordPress
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Launch of the new UT Dallas Debate website in WordPress

By Dennis Guten on March 13, 2011 No Comments

Where I work, at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Debate program is an important part of the university’s identity, likewise with the Chess program.

In fall of 2010 I launched the redesign or the Chess website in one of our new templates, which we call Venus. It was coded using Adobe Dreamweaver templates.

Since then, we have started rolling our some new sites using the WordPress MU platform, which is the multi-user version of WordPress.

The UT Dallas Debate website is the first site I have redesigned using WordPress and it just launched this past week. It also uses the Venus template, which first had to be imported into WordPress. It was the first Venus site our team in University Web Services had done so there was a big learning curve getting the template into WordPress in the first place.

It’s not totally like creating a WordPress template from scratch, which I have not attempted, because you are not using any widgets like most templates would use.

It was essentially chopping our already coded template up into the various php files that make up the pieces of a template. It was complicated by the fact that our Dreamweaver templates share CSS and other code from a templates directory on our server and that had to be preserved in case there are changes to the template down the road which will change all sites using Venus.

I think the site worked out pretty well and you cannot tell that the Chess site is static HTML and the Debate site is WordPress.

Has anyone else tried to do this with their different sites and what was your experience?

Categories : UT Dallas, Web Design, WordPress
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My purchase of the Headway Themes WordPress template

By Dennis Guten on January 23, 2011 1 Comments

I did some research into paid WordPress template frameworks and finally decided to purchase the Headway Themes template recently.

The templates I looked at for WordPress were: Headway Themes, Thesis and Genesis. Of course there are others, but these are the three WordPress premium themes I zeroed my choice down to.

Headway Themes won out because of its’ excellent visual editor feature, which let’s you see the changes as you choose them instead of having to save the options then having to refresh your blog. There are a gazillion customization options and I really wanted to see what I could get done with it.

They offer two choices, Headway Personal for $87, which allows you to use the template on two sites or Headway Developer for $164, which allows unlimited use of the template. Either option gives you unlimited upgrades for life and support for whichever option you choose. I did the Headway personal option and found a 10% online discount coupon. I still have the option to upgrade to the Developer option for $77.

It looks like I just missed the 30% off discount coupons floating around in late December for Headway, oh well.

This site, which used to use the free Curious WordPress template, which I really liked, was my first test of Headway. I just wanted to see what I could do in a few hours of messing around with it and what you see is the result. The image below shows the before and after.

I went in and quickly created a custom header, all the nav colors and threw in what they call an image rotator leaf, which is the rotating slide show near the top. For the image rotator leaf all you do is upload some images and point to the URL of each image. You can tell it how long to display each and which transition you will use. It was super easy to create as long as you made each image the same size it worked like a charm.

These leafs, which I really think of as Divs, can easily be moved all over the layout by just dragging and dropping. That’s very cool.

I have not finished with customization of AloneOnTheWeb yet. I want to see what I can make the theme do. I am planning on using the second license I purchased for a freelance website I am in the early stages of redesigning for a freelance client. The site will have lots of photography and video so it should be a real good test of the capabilities of the Headway Themes template.

Has anyone else used the Headway Themes template for WordPress recently and have any comments?

Categories : Freelance, Headway Themes, Software, Web Design, WordPress
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